Postings on network security, Silicon Valley, technology, wine, infrastructure, that ubiquitous cloud, SaAS, web 2.0, marketing, management, strategy, Companies that may be mentioned include the usual security suspects. To name a few, in no particular order - Panda, Trend Micro, ESET, Avast, Symantec, BitDefender, Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos. All of whom market their products as providing much above average security ;) .

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Inside Apple, How the Company Really Works

Fortune
Magazine Senior Editor at Large Adam Lashinksy spoke to students at Stanford University
Wednesday as part of the DFJ
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series. The topic - Inside Apple. Lashinsky is the author of “Inside
Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works”. The lecture took place at NVIDIA Auditorium in the Huang Engineering Center, close to the Packard Electrical Engineering Building and Gates Computer Science Building.

“Apple
doesn’t want us to know what goes on inside of Apple,” stated Lashinsky. At the store on the main Apple campus, individuals
can buy a shirt that has on it, “I visited
the Apple campus. But that’s all I’m
allowed to say.”

He felt that Apple’s way of doing business
violates “Everything you learned in business school.” Lashinsky emphasized that businesses should
learn from Apple, but not try to copy them.
“Competitors can better understand how to go against Apple by
understanding how Apple does it”.

“Today, the
company is not led by entrepreneurs.”
Nonetheless, Lashinsky felt that the company is entrepreneurial and that people
under Jobs were challenged (even rudely) to do their best work.

“Jobs ran Apple as a productive narcissist," Lashinsky said. He explained that , the
company had become a number of fiefdoms by the time Jobs returned in the 90's. .
They had become a fractionalized company. Jobs wanted one fiefdom, run by him.

As examples of centralizing his fiefdom and
focusing Apple, Jobs slashed the number of products the company offered
when he returned to four. Multiple advertising budgets under multiple people were combined into one. All execs reported to Jobs. Steve Jobs
hated organizational charts,.Something about not making it easy to not poach members of the executive team. Jobs’ right hand person when he returned to
Apple was Tim Cook, who is now CEO of the company.

Apple’s campus, culture, and work are compartmentalized, according to Lashinsky.
Everything is a secret. If employees aren’t working on a specific
project, their card keys won’t give them access to areas dedicated to that
project. Individual’s not working on a
product’s UI, for example, may not even know what the UI looks like until the
product introduction is held.

Apple
managers micromanage, operating on a milestone basis. Each action item is assigned to one person, the
DRI, for "directly responsible individual".

There
aren’t a lot of politics at Apple, Lashinksy stated. “You don’t have a lot of information to play
politics. So you go to work.”

“Apple has a culture of fear”, according to
Lashinsky. They have the “ultimate need
to know culture.". Part of the
culture is that Apple keeps secrets from itself. “You don’t talk about what you’re working on. You charge forward with 100% of your energy”
to do great things

Apple operates on the basis that customers
don’t really know what they want/need until it’s provided to them. Then when the product is introduced, the company can “delight
its customers with the next new thing.” He
contrasted Apple with companies that do a lot of market research on products.

As
part of its rewards for employees, Apple has an annual Top 100 retreat. Attendees are not chosen by rank. Under Jobs, the meeting room at the retreat
was swept for bugs. Jobs wouldn’t let
people take when food servers were in the room.

One Apple's obsessions is their internal focus on integration between
marketing, manufacturing, product management, engineering,
and design in a “Highly regimented, milestoned way. Design
is paramount at Apple.”

Some
other keys to Apple's success:

Stay
on script. Determine the message and
stay with it. Keep the press at arm’s
length, except important reviewers. He
mentioned the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg as one of those reviewers.

“Simplify,
simplify, simplify” is on the wall in
the marketing building on the main campus, Lines are drawn through the first two
simplifies.

Sweat
the details. “I would submit that most
companies are bad at it.” If you obsess,
it leads to excellence, the company feels.

Lashinsky felt that Jobs left the company with approximately an 18 month roadmap. It should get interesting after that.